Sunday, June 30, 2013

Golden pork award of the day

Because of recent news reports, I wanted to cross check the cost
feasibility of the NSA’s recording all of the US phonecalls and
processing them.
These estimates show only $27M in capital cost, and $2M in
electricity and take less than 5,000 square feet of space to store and
process all US phonecalls made in a year. The NSA seems to be spending
$1.7 billion on a 100k square foot datacenter that could easily handle this and much much more.

it was linked by BoingBoing, where there are a lot of interesting comments pointing out it's been going on for years, and saying they transcript the call to written data.

All this reminds me of the maid who caught that IMF big shot in a rape attempt/failure to pay her a nice fee for sex. She was caught talking to a friend in her native dialect...and no one seemed to wonder why her calls were monitored (were they allowed to do so by court order?) or who found someone to translate her call...